Before it 'died,' the music almost froze

DULUTH, Minn. -- The rickety old bus pulled out of the Duluth Armory late on Saturday, Jan. 31, 1959, and turned southeast into the frigid Wisconsin night.

DULUTH, Minn. -- The rickety old bus pulled out of the Duluth Armory late on Saturday, Jan. 31, 1959, and turned southeast into the frigid Wisconsin night.

On board were some smelly, exhausted rock 'n' rollers and their harried manager.

The Winter Dance Party tour had just finished its ninth gig in nine days and was headed for Appleton and Green Bay, Wis., for two shows that Sunday.

Then, as the temperature plunged to about minus 30 and the wind howled, fate intervened: The bus creaked to a stop as it struggled up an incline south of Hurley.

Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, Waylon Jennings, Dion and the others were stranded on a remote highway in the northern Wisconsin forest. They tried to stay warm by huddling under blankets around burning newspapers.

Holly's drummer nursed painful frostbitten feet. It was the night the music almost died.

As Holly fans worldwide converge on Iowa's Surf Ballroom to remember his death in a plane crash 50 years ago, the little-known story of the rest of the grueling tour explains why Holly chartered the airplane at Mason City two nights later.

One of the nation's most famous rock 'n' roll stars, Holly had reluctantly signed on to the tour because he needed the money. But after 11 days of touring, he was tired of the endless miles on frozen buses, the dirty clothes and sleeping sitting up.

By all accounts, the rockers gave a rousing performance in Clear Lake on Feb. 2, 1959. But rather than ride the cold bus 365 miles to Moorhead, Minn., Holly, J.P. "the Big Bopper" Richardson and Valens climbed into a single-engine plane that crashed into a cornfield in a snowstorm just after takeoff.

The story is legend --

made more famous by Don McLean's 1971 song American Pie. Not so well-known is what some call "the tour from hell."

The midwinter tour was particularly difficult for the Texans -- Holly and his reconstituted Crickets -- and for Valens, a southern California boy who hadn't taken a winter coat.

"It was so cold on the bus that we'd have to wear all our clothes, coats and everything. I couldn't believe how cold it was," wrote Jennings, who played bass for Holly on the tour. The original Crickets were in Texas.

General Artists Corp. had organized the tour with no thought to geography.

Griggs estimates they had five buses before driving into Clear Lake -- "reconditioned school buses, not good enough for school kids."

The tour started in Milwaukee before zigzagging across Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa.

On Jan. 31, the tour made its second-longest haul -- 368 miles from Fort Dodge, Iowa, to Duluth, where the show was seen by Bob Dylan, then a high-school student from Hibbing, Minn.

The Duluth show ran until about 11 p.m. The balky bus had been kept in the Armory basement to stay warm. Tour members packed up and headed into the brutally cold night.

Tommy Allsup, the Crickets' lead guitarist, has vivid memories of that next unscheduled stop.

"We had started up this incline, it was snowing real bad, and the bus just started going slower and slower, and the lights got dimmer and dimmer, and all of a sudden the bus stopped," Allsup recalls.

"The driver said, 'The bus is frozen.' It was so cold, and we were just sitting there right in the middle of the road. Everybody started thinking we were about to freeze to death."

Dion's Belmonts started lighting newspapers to generate some warmth. Holly drummer Carl Bunch was in pain and having difficulty moving his legs. Allsup looked at Bunch's feet; they had turned brown.

Suddenly, they saw headlights in the distance. A deputy sheriff, alerted by a passing trucker, got four cars to take the musicians to Hurley and Bunch to the hospital.

Monday, Feb. 2, was supposed to be an off day. But at the last minute, Clear Lake was booked. So it was back on the bus for the 355-mile trip.

Cold wasn't the only discomfort.

"We tried to hang our wrinkled suits in the aisle, and after a while, it got kind of ripe in there. We smelled like goats," Jennings wrote.

But the awful conditions also sparked camaraderie, storytelling and jamming on the bus.

Dion described in his autobiography how he and Holly got under blankets.

"Through the dark hours while we waited for something to happen, we would tell each other stories. Him, about Lubbock. Me, about the Bronx. I could always get a laugh out of him -- soft and low like his drawl."

As every Holly aficionado knows, Allsup and Jennings were supposed to be on the plane. But they gave up their seats to Valens (who won a coin toss with Allsup) and the Bopper (who was sick).

When Buddy learned that Jennings' seat had gone to the Bopper, he approached his bass player, who was haunted for years by their next exchange.